Saturday, November 28, 2015

Tiffany - the start of a young adult novel

Part I

The Locker

It wasn’t all my fault. They picked on me.
They called me “White trash.” “Trailer park trash.” They trashed my locker and taped
a note on the door: Garbage Dump. It
dripped with ketchup, mustard, chocolate syrup. (Above each word was “blood,”
“puke,” and “shit.”) Everything was gooey and dripped to the floor. The hall
monitor yelled at me and told me to clean it up.

Why
should I have to clean it up? They did it! I thought, but didn’t say. I was in enough trouble already.

Oh, I knew who they were. The snobs of Coral Springs. I lived in a trailer park in
Margate. It wasn’t a pretty place. ButI didn’t pick it, did I? Did I pick my
parents? Sure didn’t! Did I ask to be born? Sure didn’t. Not in stuck in this
life, anyway.

Who would pick drunks for parents? I sure
wouldn’t if I had a choice. I’d live in one of them big houses in Coral Springs
like them – the mall bitches who wore
clothes with other people’s names on them. Who wanted other people’s names on
clothes, anyway? Polo horses, LaCoste alligators. Dumbasses. Alligators were
ugly as hell and horse poop was just about the worst smell in the world (second
only to Pop’s puke).

I was gonna get even. You betcha. I had enough.

I found the school super in the basement. I
was gonna miss lunch break, but what the hell. It was a long walk down there,
and kinda spooky, with air-conditioning vents under the ceiling, all kinds of
pipes and wires hanging down, cartons of stuff everywhere, and broken desks and
chairs and other useless junk. He shoulda made a bonfire.

Jorge was a quiet, nice guy, kept his eyes on
his work, not one of those lechy types. A little fat around the middle, lots of
bushy black hair and a big moustache. His buttoned uniform shirt kinda bulged
open over his rotund stomach. (Didn’t think I knew a word like rotund, right? You don’t know me yet,
Jack.)

It took a while for Jorge to understand the
problem. His English wasn’t so good. When he finally got it, he grabbed his
cart with mops and brooms and pail and cleaning stuff and followed me upstairs.
We took the elevator. I didn’t even know the school had one. It was hidden behind
a door with a sign: “NO ADMITTANCE. AUTHORIZED PERSONAL ONLY.” I laughed at the
mistake. Hah. Who was the dumbass teacher that spelled it wrong? Even I knew that,
after I became good at spelling.

Jorge cleaned up the locker door mess for me,
shaking his head all the while. By the hall clock, I saw I still had ten
minutes till lunch break was over. Just enough time to hunt down my prey in the
cafeteria. And the prey better had prayed.
(I just love puns now that I’m a good speller.)

* * *

You’d think it’d be weird for a girl who
lived in a trailer park to be named Tiffany, wouldn’t you? I once heard there
was some fancy jewelry store in New York called Tiffany. My pop and mom named
me after a jewelry store? How weird is that? What were they thinking, that I’d
turn out to be some jewel of a girl? They got that wrong, didn’t they?

I spotted the skanks at their table with
the jocks. They’re always with the jocks, aren’t they? Those kind of chicks.
You never see them with the geeks or the average Joe types. Always the f—ing
jocks. Hilary and Jen and Ms. Smartypants Melody. Named for a song. Well, she’d
be singing a different tune soon, after what I had in mind.

I found an empty chair at a table about
twenty feet away, half-hidden behind one of them column things that hold up the
roof. They couldn’t see me, but I sure as hell could see them. I knew they
always scooted out of the cafeteria a little before the bell and went for a
secret smoke. But which girls’ room? That’s what I needed to know.

Tomorrow they’d find a little surprise
waiting for them.

The Kids

The kids were still in their pajamas when I
got home. This was three-thirty in the afternoon, for God’s sake. It meant they
never made it to school again. Mom and Pop were not home. That left the twins,
Amy and Jamie, to watch the little ones, Ditzy and Pip. Amy and Jamie are
eight. They’re smart kids, but they’re only eight.
OK, I was left alone to take care of them when I was only eight, but they
were in a crib then and the only trouble they’d get into was spoiling their
diapers.

Ditzy - her real name is Crystal (another
jewel, hah!) - is six. We call her Ditzy because she’s always dreaming about
something far away. When you ask her something, she’s like “What?” Like she
didn’t hear you the first, second, or third time you repeated the question. But
she heard you all along. She just didn’t want to be bothered answering your
stupid (to her) question.

And then there’s Pip. That’s Quentin, named
for our grandpop. We call him Pip because he’s only four, and little for his
age. He’s like a dot of a boy.

“Where’s Mom and Pop?” I ask, dropping my
school backpack in a corner. “Did you eat today?” I start to clear away the
cookie wrappers and left-over pizza on the coffee table. The table is wet and
sticky where someone spilled soda pop. The TV is so loud, I don’t think they
hear me, ‘cause no one answers. But what’s new about that in my family?

“Hello, I said! Where’s Mom and Pop?” I
lower the volume, and Pip cries.

“Don’t know,” Jamie says. He’s my go-to guy.
“Nothin’ much to eat,” he says. He did hear me. Just a little slow on the
uptake to answer. That’s not because he’s
slow, but Nickelodeon was more important. “The kids had bologna sandwiches. I
had peanut butter. No more bologna, no more jelly left.”

I open the refrigerator. Yuck. Dead
vegetables, sour milk, moldy stinky cheese, spilled whatevers. It smells. Really
bad. And no beer stashed anywhere. Now I know where Mom and Pop went. They were
clean out of the alcoholic stuff.

“Amy, take a bath with Ditzy. Jamie, when
they’re finished, take Pip for a bath. Then get dressed.”

I shut off the TV. Pip whimpered a little,
but I rubbed his little blond head and he hugged me around the knees, and I was
forgiven. He likes hugs and touches. Which he never gets from the Parents,
except for whacks on the backside, or worse.

While they went for their baths, I looked in
their bedroom for clean clothes. Some underwear, but nothing else wearable. I
went outside to the laundry shed and found a basket of clean clothes, all
rumpled and smooshed together, but not too bad.

When I brought the clothes inside, Amy and
Ditzy were already dried off and pulling on their panties. Amy turned away from
me like she was hiding something, so I grabbed her shoulder and turned her
around. Her back was striped red with welts.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Mom,” she said. She didn’t have to say more.

“Anybody else?”

“Pip.”

“Why?”

“He wanted Cheerios this morning and the box
was empty, so he carried on like he does. Mom started hitting him to keep him
quiet. I tried to stop her,” Amy said.

“OK,” I said. I knew what I had to do. I’d
known since I found them in their pajamas at three-thirty on a school day. “I’m
calling Mrs. Robbins.”

The Parents

Did I have a choice? It’s not that I’m a rat
or something, but I have to call Mrs. Robbins if the kids are left alone like
that. Even though I’m only fifteen and three-quarters, I’d be charged with
child abuse and neglect instead of the Parents. The kids didn’t like it. They’d
rather stay home, all together in their little hive, in the trailer park and
watch TV all day even if the Parents went missing.

Wouldn’t you know? Of course, the Parents
arrived home just as the kids were being hauled away. This time, they were all
smiling and sober, the Parents, and had Publix plastic bags filled with
groceries. (They left the 12-packs of beer hidden in the shadowy back of the
trunk so they wouldn’t be spotted.) This time the kids stayed home.

Later, I was walloped by my mom. She wasn’t
even careful about hitting me where the bruise wouldn’t show. Instead, I had a
nice black and blue mark the size of an apple on the left side of my face.

Life at home. Tiffany, the jewel, me.

Revenge

OK. The plan was to hide in a bathroom stall before
the Three Mouseketeers sneaked out for their midmorning smoke. But I was two
minutes late because Mr. Spinoza held me back after class to chew me out for
sloppy algebra homework.

The door to the girls’ room needed a good
dose of WD-40. The hinges squealed a high-pitched “Sheeeeeeello” at me. And as
soon as I entered, I could see I was up to my eyeballs in trouble. Not just any
kind of trouble or only my eyeballs,
but three other sets of eyeballs – all fixed on me. I was in the kind of trouble that screamed “Run!” The kind of
trouble that made running impossible. The kind of trouble that was three
hulking gang girls outnumbering me, without my planned advantage of surprise. The
kind of trouble that if I screamed, no one would hear me. Not here in the
girls’ room at the far end of the cavernous, silent gymnasium.

“What are you doing here, bitch?” Melody
said. She stepped real close, her perfect little nose almost touching mine, not
in a nice Eskimo kiss kind of way either. She took a drag on her cigarette and
exhaled the smoke right into my eyes.

“Nothin’,” I said.

“Nothin’,” she mimicked. “Then get out.” Up
so close, I could see her makeup: black-rimmed eyeliner and thick mascara.
Raspberry lipstick. She wore long light earrings, silvery like chandelier tiers
with little bells on the ends.

Jen had slid behind me, blocking my exit out
the door.

“Hey, guys, look at Miss Trailer Trash’s
little treasure!” she said. She yanked at the red bat, and I let it go. No
point now.

“Let me by,” I said. “I’ll get out of your
way.” I moved a half-inch closer to Melody’s pretty face. I might as well tough
it out. I was a goner anyway, so why lose my dignity too? I knew they didn’t
only want me out of the girls’ room but out of their snooty school too.

Hilary casually pulled a majorette’s baton
out of her backpack, then twirled it in a menacing way I didn’t really
appreciate. I kept my eyes locked onto Melody’s but I could also see Hilary spinning
the gleaming cylinder. It caught chinks of light from the overhead fluorescents
like a weapon on fire.

I was caught between the washbasins and the
door, surrounded by the Three Miceketeers. The odds weren’t good.

Jen had placed the red plastic bat on the
floor, leaning against the sink’s pipes, just out of her reach now when she’d
moved a step closer to me. It was time to make this my game. I had enough of the cat-and-rats game we were playing.

Am I
faster than them? That was
the question. Would that twirling steel cylinder strike home before I could
reach the door and freedom?

What
would Clint Eastwood do? I
thought. Distract, then attack.

I glanced at the bat, knowing Melody’s eyes
would look in the same direction, then I struck. I pulled on her silvery,
tinkly earring. I heard her awful cry as it tore her earlobe. Then I ducked
down and, just like a soccer player, butted my head into Jen’s belly. She was
thrown off-balance, and crashed into the metal towel dispenser, hitting her
head.

I grabbed the bat from the floor, and
brandished it like a sword at Hilary, who threw up her hands in defense.

Then just like Clint in a barroom brawl, I
was out of there!

The Law

And into the arms of the law!

He stood there, all three hundred pounds of
him, with a whistle hanging from his thick jelly neck. Mr. Malone, the boys’
phys ed teacher, glared at me as I stopped just short of tumbling into his wide
stomach.

There was no way I could hide the bat, so I
just let it slip out of my fingers onto the floor behind me.

Take
your punishment like a man,
I told myself.

And I was hauled off to jail.

Well, not right away, exactly. To the
principal’s office. Mrs. Giraldi was out, they said, and I was to wait on the
hard wood bench opposite the school secretary’s desk.

Melody, Hilary, and Jen were nowhere in
sight. As I sat there biting my nails (a bad and, I have to admit, shameful
habit I usually hide), I figured the three ratketeers probably were worming
their way out of punishment and laying the blame all on me.

Sure enough, when Mr. Malone and Mrs. Giraldi
walked into the office, speaking to each other in low whispers, I knew my goose
was cooked, and I mean with skin burnt! I was done, over, roasted, toasted,
done!

“Miss Thomas, please follow me.” Mrs. Giraldi,
a pretty dark-haired lady with a too-large tush that shuffled from cheek to
cheek as she walked on skinny high heels, opened her inner office with a key,
then beckoned me after her without once looking me in the eye.

“Sit there, Miss Thomas.” She pointed to a
leather chair beside her desk. She rang the intercom and asked the secretary to
bring in my file.

“It will take a few minutes,” Jean the
secretary said.

“We’ll wait,” Mrs. Giraldi said. She picked
up the phone and listened to her voicemail messages while I bit my cuticles.
I’d pretty much bitten the edges off all my nails by now. A clock on the desk
said two-forty-five. In less than fifteen minutes the bell would ring to end
the school day.

Fifteen
minutes, I thought. I didn’t
think I could sit still for the longest fifteen minutes of my life without bolting
from the chair and running screaming out the door.

Finally, she hung up the phone, and turned to
look at me. Her eyes were the kind of steely gray-blue that seemed to have a
fluorescent lamp somewhere behind them. Cold and so bright they hurt.

“Well, Miss Thomas,” she began. “What do you
have to say for yourself? Paramedics arrived to take Miss Reynolds to the
hospital. She has a bloody gash on her head, and may have suffered a
concussion.”

“It was an accident,” I said.

“An accident? The girls say you attacked them
with a baseball bat. This bat.” She picked it up from behind the desk.

“I was defending myself, and Jen came after
me. I pushed her away, and she fell.”

“You were defending yourself? The girls said
you were hiding in the bathroom and attacked them when they came in.”

“No, they were smoking in there. They
attacked me – three to one.”

“Do you mean to say you usually come to
school with a baseball bat?”

“Uh, no. I found it in the bathroom.” (I
really do hate to lie, but...) “I only picked it up when they started swinging
at me.”

Mrs. Giraldi stared at me, her eyebrows
raised above her black-framed glasses. I could see she wasn’t buying it.

Someone knocked on the door. Jean, with my
file.

Mrs. Giraldi stretched out her hand to take
the folder, then lay it open on her desk.

“Thanks, Jean,” she said. “That’s all for
now. Please close the door behind you.”

Right hand cuticles were trimmed nicely now.
I started on the left.

After a few minutes, Mrs. Giraldi looked up
straight into my eyes. Damn, but her eyes were sharp as glass.

“What surprises me, Miss Thomas, is that
you’re actually not a stupid girl. In fact, your scores and aptitude place you
in the top percentile of your grade. Yet you consistently do poorly on tests,
you’re absent a lot, and you rarely hand in your homework assignments. What is
the problem?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Lame, aren’t I?

“Well, it looks as if you need to take school
more seriously and learn there are consequences to your actions. You are
suspended for a month. A community service officer is on her way to take you to
the police precinct. Your parents have been notified and will meet you there.”

Oh,
my God, I thought.

“One additional thing: Suspension is not a
vacation. You will be responsible for all your schoolwork while you remain at
home, that is if you are not incarcerated. That is all. Please wait here a
moment.”

Then she stood up, her rump jiggling as if it
were an independent creature, and went out of the office, closing the door
again. When she returned (what seemed to be an hour later, but was only two
minutes later), the community service officer was with her: an African-American
woman with a pleasant face, short legs, and wearing a policeman’s uniform.

You can already guess
what happened at the police station, so why go into all the gory details.

My Pop arrived two hours late.
Meanwhile I counted the perps the cops dragged in: DUIs, streetwalkers, gas
station and convenience store bandits. It got to the point where I could tell
you what everyone was wearing; it was that
borrrrrrrrrring. I even forgot to be scared. (Which was a good thing, or I
would've had to peel off my sneakers and socks and start gnawing on
toenails next.)

Jen’s dad arrived and filled out
a lot of forms. I knew it must be him because he kept looking at me as if I had
leprosy. Remember leprosy? We learned about it in middle school. They used to
think it was contagious so they took all the lepers (that’s what they called
people with the disease) to an island somewhere. We saw old photos. So gross.

And that’s what it felt like to
be suspended from school and under house arrest. Like a bleeping leper!

I had to stay home all day and
take care of the kids. For the Parents, it was like they were on holiday.
Boozing and staying out all night. Falling into bed before daylight and
sleeping till the older kids came home from school, or waking for dinnertime.

Hah, dinnertime. A joke. No one
went to the grocery unless there was no beer left. I learned to be foxy with
the money. When Pop’s monthly disability check came in and he’d cashed it, I
waited till they were dead asleep and then I’d take a hundred and hide it. He
was always so stewed he never knew how much he had or had spent. I learned when
Ma's unemployment check came in also, but I had to be cagier with her - taking
the money out in fives and dollar bills so she wouldn't notice. She may have
been a boozer, but cash sung to her.

So a couple of nights a week,
after the Parents dragged themselves out of the house and into Pop’s beat-up
Ford pickup truck, I ordered pizza or Chinese takeout, or the twins would walk
over to Mickey D’s for some quarter pounders, fries, and kids’ meals with the
plastic toys that the little ones loved. And that’s how we had food to eat.

And that’s also how I met Marc,
the pizza guy, and fell in love.

Pizza Guy Plays a
Guitar

The kids kicked an old beer can around the
front yard while I read 1984. It was
a weird book, about this Big Brother stuff, like government was watching
everything you did. I could relate, you know, because police cars buzzed around
our block a lot, and the Department of Children and Families people were always
coming around. The book wasn’t my choice, but it was part of my English assignments.
Yeah, like I said, being suspended didn’t mean you could get away from doing
your schoolwork.

A Chevy Nova pulled into our driveway, and
this dude with a Domino’s baseball cap slid our pepperoni pizza across his arms.
He walked like a ball player, not as big as a football player, more like
baseball or soccer, confident like. He sort of ambled up the gravel path, kinda
twinkly smiling at me as he walked.

“For you, Princess?”

“Right, that’s me. Princess.” I made a
face, but then I was sorry, because Pizza Guy’s whole face smiled back, lips,
cheeks, eyes. Like a bright light. It was like a real smile, see. Not a phony
one.

I couldn’t help but smile back. This time
for real, also, like him.

“Your kids?” he said.

“Sure, I was an early bloomer,” I said.

He sat down on the trailer’s front steps,
balanced the pizza on his knees, and took off his hat. Dark curls fell onto his
forehead. I wanted to push them back, but that’s what he did, wiped his hand
across his forehead, like he was tired or something. He had dark eyes with long
lashes. His knee touched mine. It was warm. A tingle ran up my leg.

“Are you tired?” I turned my face toward
him.

“Yeah, it’s the end of my shift and I was
up all night.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why were you up all night?”

“Oh, we played a gig,” he said.

“You’re in a band?”

“Yeah. What are you reading? 1984? Heavy-duty stuff.”

I shrugged. “It’s school stuff.”

He nodded. “You better bring the pizza in or
it’ll get cold soon,” he said, then stood up and handed the box to me.

“Sure. Uh, I have the money inside. Can you
wait a minute –or, uh, you can come in.” There was something about him, and I
didn’t want him to leave yet.

“Sure, I can come in a minute.”

I called Amy and Jamie and Ditzy to come in
from the yard. Pip was parked on the couch watching TV and sucking his thumb.

I went into the bedroom I shared with the
kids and pulled out a ten-dollar bill and two singles for a tip.

Pizza Guy stood between the kitchen and
living room.

“Uh, would you like to stay a while and have
a slice?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That’d be nice.”

I pointed to the kitchen table and Pizza Guy
sat down. I set the table with paper plates and plastic cups, and got a
two-liter bottle of Pepsi from the fridge. The little ones grabbed a slice each
and plopped themselves down in front of the TV in the living room, leaving me alone
with Pizza Guy in the kitchen.

It wasn’t as if I’d never had a boyfriend
or something. But all of a sudden I couldn’t think of nothing to say. So I
asked questions, one after another, questions, questions tumbled out of my
mouth. What’s your name? What’s your band’s name? Where do live? How old are
you? Got any sisters or brothers? Mothers or fathers? Pets? Go to school?
Questions, questions, questions. If he tried to question me back, I’d just fire
another one away.

He could hardly eat, I asked so many
questions.

When he left, all he knew about me was my
name: Tiff. That’s what I told him. Tiff, like “Tough.” Like better watch out,
buster, or I’ll bust you. Inside I
was like saying, Please don’t hurt me. I
break real easy.

* * *

Pizza Guy – his name was Marc Jaffe – said
he’d come back tomorrow at the end of his shift and bring his guitar so I could
hear his music. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but I sure wanted
to.